As the value and use of information continues to increase, individuals and businesses seek additional ways to process and store information. One option available to these users is an information handling system. An information handling system generally processes, compiles, stores, and/or communicates information or data for business, personal, or other purposes thereby allowing users to take advantage of the value of the information. Because technology and information handling needs and requirements vary between different users or applications, information handling systems may vary with respect to the type of information handled; the methods for handling the information; the methods for processing, storing or communicating the information; the amount of information processed, stored, or communicated; and the speed and efficiency with which the information is processed, stored, or communicated. The variations in information handling systems allow for information handling systems to be general or configured for a specific user or specific use such as financial transaction processing, airline reservations, enterprise data storage, or global communications. In addition, information handling systems may include or comprise a variety of hardware and software components that may be configured to process, store, and communicate information and may include one or more computer systems, data storage systems, and networking systems.
Information handling systems may be configured for operation based on a virtualization model. Virtualization may be a computer networking model where a set of information handling systems may be configured as host servers for access by a set of remote clients. The set of information handling systems may be included within a data center. Often, the number of servers is small relative to the number of remote clients that the host servers are capable of hosting.
With desktop virtualization, one or more servers may host a remote client user desktop environment and applications via a client-server model. The benefits of virtualization may include improved manageability and security of end user computing, for example, by migrating client workloads to a data center. Such migration of client workloads places demanding requirements on the storage back-end. One difficulty to be considered is scalability, as the storage back-end may host thousands of user sessions as in the case of a Storage Area Network (SAN), for example. Another difficulty is impact on performance, as the storage back-end may support bursty client workloads, for example. Yet another difficulty is latency in application responsiveness as compared to client platforms. Such demanding requirements hamper performance and capacity of systems employing virtualization. Accordingly, it is desirable to provide systems and methods for managing storage for client workloads in order to unify and optimize storage management.